A fragment of the world, a piece of human consciousness: Tim Bowling’s "The Bone Sharps" (2007) and "The Tinsmith" (2012)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian novelist, poet and essayist Tim Bowling is one of the most prestigious authors in 21st-century Canadian letters. A prolific and versatile author, he has published twelve poetry collections, four novels, a memoir and a work of creative non-fiction so far. This paper looks at two of his novels, "The Bone Sharps" (2007) and "The Tinsmith" (2012), tools of knowledge that explore not just human consciousness as the lens through which we make sense of reality, including our selves, but also history, memory and identity, epistemology and ethics. A fragment of the world and a piece of human consciousness: this is what both novels are.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".